A longtime student manager who never played a minute of college basketball, Fairley simply paid attention to his environment and soaked up all the information he could.

But then, little about the serpentine life of Fairley, a 27-year-old first-year Norfolk State assistant from the D.C. suburb of Largo, Md., has been ordinary.

He worked his way through college with odd hours at a Cracker Barrel. He handles video scouting for the Spartans despite arriving with a complete lack of technical skills. He often practices with the team when bodies are in short supply. And he graduated from NSU without completing his degree.

Fairley's unusual journey included, at age 6, watching his mother drown in a hotel pool and leaning on years of help from friends and family to process it and move forward.

Fairley, who’s never met a stranger or a conversation he didn’t like, has achieved a fantasy of sorts: With a strong work ethic, a natural curiosity and a clear goal in mind, he’s gone from low man in the pecking order to one with actual authority.

“If you told me I would find my way to being an assistant coach – a young one at that … I wouldn’t believe you,” Fairley said. “I didn’t see that path. You’ve got to find your way, and God knows I had no clue.”

So how does this even happen, this exceedingly rare transformation from wannabe player to respected coach? Well, it’s complicated, and if you have about an hour, Fairley will explain if prompted by one simple question: So, what’s your story?

With no intention of attending NSU, Fairley visited the campus with a cousin. He liked what he saw and enrolled.

A decent 6-foot high school player, he had no college offers to play basketball. Fairley twice tried out for the school’s basketball team but was turned away. During his junior year, in 2011-12, he had become close with some members of the team through pickup and intramural games. Meanwhile, he began developing a relationship through casual games with future Spartans assistant C.J. Clemons, who was then running Bryant & Stratton College’s startup program in Virginia Beach.

A journalism major, Fairley began coming to NSU’s practices to help out any way he could.

His was grunt work. He’d set up Echols Hall for practice, do laundry at hotels on the road while the players and coaches were out having a good time and clean up the arena after practices.

“Any little menial task you can think of,” Fairley said.

Simultaneously, the bottom was falling out of Fairley’s life. The house on Norview Avenue he’d shared with his cousin and two others – until one of them skipped out on the rent – often went dark or dry or cold because they couldn’t muster the funds for power, water or gas.

His car quit on him, meaning he had to rely on Uber or patient friends to get where he needed to go.

He was also living a secret. When Fairley walked across the stage at graduation in 2014, he didn’t know that he’d failed an intercultural communication class. The only way he could finish his degree was to re-enroll, and he certainly didn’t have the money for that.

Depression began to set in.

“I had some dark days,” Fairley said. “I’d be at work in the back, slaving, like, ‘Yo, I gotta get out of this. This isn’t how my life is supposed to be going.”

Grinding away

Fairley continued to help with menial tasks at NSU while working “obscene hours” at Cracker Barrel, doing everything from waiting tables to washing dishes to unloading trucks.

An understanding boss allowed him to continue to go to basketball practice, where Clemons, an alumnus hired by head coach Robert Jones in 2015, was now an assistant.

Fairley remembers being pulled aside by Clemons after a pickup game and asked, “Would you ever consider coaching JUCO?”

“I love the game,” Fairley recalled, “so I was like, ‘Yeah, I would do that if I could.’ That’s one moment that stuck with me.”

One day at practice, Jones noticed that things went more smoothly when Fairley was around. Eventually, his duties expanded to putting together video clips of opponents, and after a crash course from his older brother and much trial and error, he mastered it and began to travel with the team.

Soon the coaches realized that Fairley possessed a special skill: From the bench during games, he could recognize opponents’ play calls and the resulting actions. He began documenting them, meaning that the next time the teams met and plays were called, Fairley would correctly shout out what was about to happen.

“He has a good basketball mind,” Jones said. “Like anything, he’s learning to convey his message quicker because the attention span of these kids is short.”

But before there was a message to convey, Jones, Clemons and several of their players urged Fairley to finish his degree.

“So you only have one class?” one assistant coach would ask, incredulous. “That’s it? One class?”

Lou Hamilton, an assistant on NSU’s women’s staff, gave him a way out of his unstable house. Hamilton allowed Fairley to live with him, splitting the rent, which allowed him to start saving.

After enrolling online, Fairley needed to come up with an extra $653 a month for four months in order to pay his tuition. He worked more shifts at the restaurant. He squirreled away everything he could. He looked for other sources of income, all while continuing to volunteer with the basketball team with more and more duties.

“I was to the point that if I had to go without some water or whatever to get that class done, I was going to do it,” Fairley said.

Having paid tuition for three months, when the time came for the fourth, Fairley came up short.

One day as he sat working in Clemons’ office, Fairley was approached by Jones, who had seen how hard he’d been working.

Jones slipped him the balance of what he needed to stay in school, about $500. It was an act unseen but not unappreciated. Fairley was speechless.

“I knew he was struggling,” Jones said, adding that he wasn’t asked for the money. …”Fortunately, I was in a position to help him out. As I get older, if you’re in a position to help people, I don’t mind helping people

“I believe in hard work. I think that you should be rewarded for hard work.”

The biggest reward was yet to come.

A tragic turn

Fairley, who described himself as “an energy-hustle-role player” in his high school days, had taken it upon himself to improve before.

At age 10, he said, he was a horrible basketball player who played an entire season without scoring a point.

The following summer, tired of being teased by friends about it, Fairley vowed that it would never happen again.

He spent long hours and countless days on his court at home, refining his shot and his ball-handling skills. He watched instructional DVDs and as many basketball games as he could.

When he returned to the team, he was its best player. By the age of 12, Fairley was playing in pickup games with grown men, impressing them with his ability to corral loose balls and get to the rim.

By his sophomore year of high school at the Christian school he attended from K-12, he was playing varsity. As a senior, he averaged 17 points and six rebounds.

Fairley looks back at his 10-year-old self and sees it as a turning point in his life.

“From that day forth, I just had a certain fight to me,” he said.

He’d already displayed that quality. On the afternoon of June 21, 1999, as Fairley and his parents vacationed at a Days Inn near the Ozarks in Missouri, he and his mother, Michelle, decided to go for a swim while his dad, Leon, waited in the room. Neither of them could swim.

With no lifeguard present and no one else in the pool, Michelle drifted too far toward the deep end. She couldn’t’ get back. Her son threw a beach ball they’d been playing with toward her, but it just floated there as she went under.

At 6, Fairley recalls, “I didn’t know what the heck was going on.”

Eventually, a woman and her child ventured by. Starting to panic, Fairley managed to say, “I think my mom’s in the pool.”

Finally, a hotel manager dove into the water and pulled her out. But it was too late. She was 52.

Fairley was about to start life without a mother, though he credits his father, now a retired baker who does landscaping, with holding things together.

Fairley saw a psychiatrist to deal with the trauma of having essentially watched his mother die. A series of family friends and aunts helped, constantly checking in on him and his father.

For months, Fairley cried easily and often when he saw things that reminded him of his mom. Things finally stabilized when he returned to school that fall.

“You see a lot people talk about single mothers and dogging fathers, especially black men,” said Fairley, who is black. “My dad is the G.O.A.T. He made it look like it wasn’t that hard, and I know it was hard. I never struggled in life. Never. I wasn’t rich, but I lived a very good life.”

“The only thing in your life you can control is your perspective,” Williams told the crowd at the Chesapeake Conference Center. “Everything else is out of control but your perspective and how you look at things.”

Williams encouraged Fairley to keep working hard with the basketball team despite his low-key role. The words stuck.

“That changed how I looked at everything,” Fairley said. “No matter how bad everything would get, I never got too despondent. I was like, ‘Yo, there’s a way out of this situation. I’ve got to find it. Because God wouldn’t put me in something I couldn’t get out of.”

Before the current season, Jones parted ways with an NSU assistant, creating an opening and setting into motion the wheels in the coach’s mind.

Fairley would’ve been content with returning for another season as a volunteer, but Jones wanted to get him on board despite a hiring freeze.

To make it work, Fairley was willing to start as an interim assistant for a lower salary than he would’ve earned under conventional circumstances.

“It’s not a big deal,” Fairley said. “I didn’t care. It was the job title and just being able to do what I love.

“I was like, ‘I’ll make life work,’ because that’s what I was doing.”

Though Fairley's manager-to-coach transition is unusual, it's not unprecedented. Former managers have made the move at UNLV and Liberty in recent years, further proving that it's wise to work hard and pay attention.

Fairley, who was close to the players as a manager, had to take a step back and become an authority figure, though he still fills in as an extra practice player on occasion.

The transition, the players said, has been seamless.

“I witnessed him start from the bottom, so for him to get where he’s at, I’m proud of him,” said senior forward Jordan Butler.

“He’s a coach now. He’s my coach. He even helps me work out. So for him joining the coaching staff, I know the type of knowledge that he brings to the team. He’s definitely a plus for us.”

Added senior forward Alex Long: “He’s very knowledgeable about the game. He knows what he’s doing. I always knew at one point, he had a future in basketball coaching. He wasn’t going to be a manager forever. He knows too much. I’m glad I got to be here to see it, to be honest. I’m proud of him.”

How meaningful was it to Fairley that he'd finally completed the transformation to full-time coach? When it finally hit him, it really hit him.

“I actually sat in my office and shed a tear," he said. "I was just like, ‘Yo, I really made it. This is so crazy. Everything was worth it.’ It was surreal – really surreal."

Fairley uses his cautionary back-story to remind NSU’s players that anything is possible with the right amount of knowledge, effort and desire.

Spartans guard Steven Whitley, whose own path was nearly as unorthodox, can relate.

“It shows: Don’t ever quit,” said Whitley, a Booker T. Washington High alum who played at Fork Union Military Academy and Robert Morris before landing at NSU, just blocks from his former high school. “He was doing this plenty of years.

“It definitely motivates all of us, because Len didn’t stop. He didn’t quit. He is where he is now. Now he’s getting paid for something he loves to do, and it’s only the beginning for him.”

Jones, who calls Fairley “Radio” after the movie character because of his intense focus, agrees. Well, he agrees that Fairley should at least be given a chance.

“I think you should be rewarded for merit,” Jones said. “He worked hard, and I think that he deserved it. Somebody gave me a shot many years ago. This is his shot to see what he can do with it now. If he does great, then he can move. If he doesn’t, he’s got to go.”

Fairley isn’t sure what he wants to do in this unexpected career. He only sets short-term goals and tries not to think about the big picture.

The future, as he’s learned, sometime unfolds at its own pace. All people can do, as he frequently tells those curious about his journey and how he’s managed it, is the best they can.

“Stay true to what you’re doing,” Fairley said. “If you put in work and you give to the game, it gives back to you in ways you might not have imagined.”